Category Archives: Switzerland

John Engelman: Contrary to what Karl Marx said, for most people most of the time loyalties of nation, race and ethnicity are stronger than loyalties of class. The working class in the United States has always been more diverse than the working class in European countries. It is becoming more diverse with the influx of non whites.

To get class consciousness you really need a homogeneous working class. It helps if the working class is ethnically distinct from the upper class. In Scotland the upper class is English, or Anglicized Scottish. That is to say Scottish, but educated in England, and often speaking with English accents.

The clear majority of Scots vote for the British Labour Party. English workers are more likely to vote for the British Conservative Party.

The argument is circular in a sense because as you look around the world, generally what you see in most cases is an ethnically homogenous working class.

Would you describe the working classes of Latin America as homogeneous or diverse? They seem to be a mixture of White, Indian and Black and the mestizo, mulatto and Zambo mixtures, correct? Yet the diverse working classes down there have high working class consciousness despite their diverse nature.

Aren’t North African and Gulf countries fairly mixed between Blacks and Arabs?

Certainly in Arabia, lands with diverse working classes of Kurds, Arabs and Iranian working classes are all very left.

I believe Sri Lanka even with the vicious Tamil versus Sinhalese war, the diverse working class is leftwing. In Burma the working class is very left although there have been wild ethnic wars sputtering on for decades.

In Russia and other nations of the former USSR, there are many ethnic minorities, but the workers are still working class.

A recent exception is Ukraine where workers have gone radical Right. The former Yugoslavia is still very leftwing even after all of the ethnic conflict and even slaughter of past years. Spain’s working class is very radical despite an armed conflict in the Basque region and separatists in Catalonia. The different religions hate each other in North Ireland, but the Scottish Protestant workers are as class conscious as the Irish Catholic ones. Switzerland is divided between three ethnic groups – French, Germans, and Italians – yet it is a very leftwing country.

The extreme tribalism in Africa has not prevented the working classes from being class conscious.

Is the working class of England voting Tory yet? Or do you just mean that they are more likely to vote Tory than the Scots are?

Most workers in Europe, Arabia, North Africa, Africa, the former USSR, China, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Japan, South Korea, Nepal are the same ethnicity as the ruling classes of those places, yet workers have a high degree of class consciousness in all of those places.

The places where working class consciousness has been harder to develop were those that had a Chinese ruling class as in Philippines and Indonesia.

I think we need to come up with some better theories about the poor class consciousness of the US working class. If you are looking for examples elsewhere, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, the Baltics and Colombia are places with quite poor working class consciousness.

In Australia it is recent as US style conservatism is imported.

A similar trend is underway in Canada and has been since Thatcher in the UK. But the UK is in nearly a revolutionary situation. A lot of the working classes are militant and radicalized, while a lot of the country has at the same time gone Tory. When Thatcher died, there were anti-rich riots in housing estates across the land. Thatcher was burned in effigy in the streets. Can you imagine that happening in the US?

The recent riots in the UK also had a class undercurrent. I was dating a British woman at the time, and she told me that local storeowners who treated the community well were spared by rioters. Rioters focused on stores selling upscale goods to the rich. Many corporate outlets were also smashed.

She told me that a number of those outlets had a reputation for not paying taxes to the UK by hiding money offshore. She said the rioters knew who those companies were, and they were brutally singled out. Many outlets were burned to the ground. Can you imagine heavily Black rioters in the US having class consciousness like that?

The Baltics are a case of entire nations full of complete idiots who hate Communism so much that they went into an extreme overreaction against Communism and turned against anything socialist, left, liberal or mildly progressive. Fascist heroes including many Nazis with a lot of Jewish blood on their hands were celebrated. Communist parties were outlawed, and Russian minorities were viciously maltreated.

Radical rightwingers were elected in all of these lands, and Chicago Boys Friedmanite experiments were undertaken. The results were predictable. In the recent economic crash, the most neoliberal European countries were the most devastated of all. Estonia was eviscerated, and Latvia was almost wiped off the map. 1/3 of the Latvian population left the country, including almost all of the educated people.

The Philippines and Indonesian cases are up for discussion, but these are Latin American situations of a ruling class of a different ethnicity than the working classes holding forth brutally and anti-democratically over the people. In addition, the workers have little consciousness.

Taiwan has a similar legacy where extreme hatred of Communism resulted in being ruled by reactionary fascist anti-Communists for decades. There is a nascent Left now, but it has little power yet. The wealth of the country seems to have gotten in the way of working class consciousness. Probably the extreme anti-Communism helped too, as any working class movement could be quickly portrayed as Communist.

Judith Mirville: The Second Amendment was written in view of defending the young Republic in sparsely populated counties where you could be attacked by foreign marauders (it then included slaving marauders from Muslim North Africa as the country was still too poor to afford a real combating coastguard) without other recourse than your own fighting capacity. It was never meant to defend your individual property against the general citizenry, otherwise it would have been seen by all as tantamount to a return to feudalism, by definition.

The second amendment specified that anywhere there was sufficient official protection from foreign enemies and outlaws the individual bearing of weapons was not to be tolerated as a way of life and should be subject to about the same restrictions as in any civilized country of the Old World.

Switzerland decided about individual bearing of arms for the same reason : most of the land was mountainous wilderness where official authority was not available and was to be provided by inhabitants taking turns to patrol. Switzerland being in Europe, it could not escape defining even stricter norms of arms control for its citizens than the neighboring countries : you are entitled only to keep and bear weapons in as much as you do it as a soldier of your country, albeit on a part-time basis, and as soon as you tote one, you tote it in conformity with precise military orders.

I do favor an enlarged body of weapons-toters, so as for any wacko shooter to be sure that in case he starts his rampage his fire is most likely to be answered in kind, but anybody bearing arms according to the second amendment should do it as a voluntary US soldier, subject to military penalties as soon as he doesn’t obey the local military command as to the proper use of his military material. Any citizen should be granted the right to ask any weapon tote his voluntary soldier’s particular identity and particular reason to bear it (like acting as a voluntary vigilante in a drug lord ridden ghetto) in the same way he is entitled to ask any policeman’s uniform bearer his identity as a policeman.

I for one am thinking that America is now dividing into two : those for whom the first amendment about free speech and free expression is the only real sacred one, which includes the right to express oneself without any chance to be hit by stray bullets from frustrated control freaks ans therefore gun control, and those for whom the second amendment only is sacred, which includes your sacred rights to use your gun to suppress voices you claim as Unamerican or dissident.

We have had a few conservatives posting here in the past few days. These are US-style conservatives, which are the worst kind of all. US-style conservatives are absolutely banned from posting here in any way, shape or form.

Conservatism means different things in different countries, so conservatives from much of the rest of the world (except Latin America and the UK) can continue to post. Even Canadian conservatives can continue to post, as I do not mind them. It’s not conservatism itself that is so awful. Almost every country on Earth has people who call themselves conservatives, and there are conservative parties in almost every country on Earth. But being a conservative just about anywhere outside of the Americas is more or less an acceptable position for me. I probably won’t like their politics much, but I could at least look at them and say that this is an opposition I could live with.

US conservatives and their brethren in the UK, Latin America, the Philippines, Nepal and and Indonesia are quite a different beast.

I have to think hard about conservatives in Eastern Europe, especially Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic. These fools had such a bad experience with Communism that they went 180 degrees in the other direction. I would have to see the positions of these conservative parties in those countries to see whether they would be OK or not.

Just to give you an example, Vladimir Putin is considered to be a right-winger, and his party United Russia advocates a politics called Russian Conservatism. Looking at the party’s platform, this is not only a conservatism that I could live with but one I might even vote for!

Conservatives in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and most other places in Asia are acceptable. The conservatives in the Stans, Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia can be rather awful, particularly in the nationalist sense, but I will not ban them.

I dislike Indian conservatives, but I will not ban them.

Conservatives from the Muslim World are all acceptable. In the Muslim World, conservatism just means religious and sometimes nationalist. I can live with that. Even the ones in Iran are orders of magnitude better than the US type.

Conservatives in the Arab World are acceptable. They are mostly just religious people.

Turkish conservatives are awful, but I will not ban them. They are just religious and a particularly awful type of nationalist.

African conservatives are OK.

Conservatives in Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, Italy, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania are sometimes good, sometimes pretty bad, but they are all acceptable here. Conservatism in Europe mostly means nationalism. I am actually rather fond of the conservative running Hungary, Orban. LePen conservatives leave something to be desired, but they are acceptable. They’re mostly just nationalists. Hell, I might even vote for Marine LePen! If it was down to LePen versus Macron, I would absolutely support LePen!

Conservatives from Indonesia, Nepal and Philippines are not OK. These are an “everything for the rich elite, nothing for anybody else” type of conservative. Some of them even hide under the labels of Socialist or even Communist.

The word conservative has no real inherent meaning. It means whatever people say it means.

Anyway, the conservatives in the US are pure garbage and recently they have become out and out fascists after moving in that direction for a long time. And a particularly horrible type of fascist at that, a Latin American/Filipino/Indonesian style fascist. I will not allow any US conservatives to post on this board. You all are lucky I even let you lurk here. That’s an idle threat as I can’t ban lurkers, but if they all stopped lurking, I would not mind frankly.

You all really ought to go back to the gutters you crawled out of.

PS This especially applies to Libertarians, the very worst of all the US conservative vermin. We shoot Libertarians on sight here, so you better watch out.

*This applies only to economic conservatives. If you are not an economic conservative, and your conservatism is only of the social variety or you are only conservative on race, religion, guns, law and order, respect for tradition, American nationalism, the military, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity issues, you can stay. I’m not crazy about some social conservatives, but I can live with them. I will probably even let patriotards post as long as they are not economic conservatives.

I am an American nationalist myself. I just don’t like patriotards. Of course, I very much dislike and even hate the country as it is right now, but I sure don’t want to make it worse! I have to live here too you now, and it might as well be as pleasant as possible as long I stay here.

I want what’s best for my country. I don’t want to harm this country or screw it over. That will be bad for me! And believe it or not, most US patriotards do not want what is best for the country! I have dreams of a greater and better America. It’s not impossible, but we will have to undergo some serious cultural changes. One of the reasons I am so against illegal immigration is because it is ruining my country and making this place even worse. Also illegal immigration is terrible for US workers and I am for the workers. I am against H-1B visas for the same reason – they are wrecking my country. IT workers are workers too, so they are my comrades. I want what is best for America and American workers.

I cannot live with economic conservatives. I like cancer way more than I like US conservatives. Cancer is much more decent and respectable.

This is going to have to be the way forward. In the next 20 years, 50% of all jobs in the US are projected to be lost due to automation. I do not believe any of the rosy scenarios idiots are trying to paint out of this. “But we will need humans to run/fix/maintain those machines!” being just one of them. Another one is, “Cool! Now most of us can just kick back and be rich now!”

At that point the only way forward will be for the humans to form a Neo-Luddite Movement and rise up and destroy the machines. This revolution may even have popular support. People are waiting in line at a checkout counter in a Big Box store. Several young men wearing black baclavas rush into the store with hammers and smash up a few machines before running away. All of the people in line cheer and a mob forms to block the security guards racing to the scene. As the Black Bloc guys race through the parking lot, cars stop and tell them to hop in on.

We could have property-destroying revolutionaries everywhere, cheered on by onlookers who obstructed police and security, refused to cooperate with law enforcement, and even offered the revolutionaries a mass base of 10’s of millions who would support, feed, drive and hide them. I’m already down with it.

I fantasize regularly now about being one of those revolutionaries, pulling up to places at all ours of the day or night, running up to some machines with a hammer, smashing away at some machines, and taking off. I’ve already committed some crimes like this before against some of my enemies, both individuals and businesses. Crime is a rush like no other that I have ever experienced. Nothing else comes close.

Mountleek: Yes, probably every country is different. France is, as we know, quite aggressive towards other languages, for example.

I still think that the strength of regional lects is overrated. How many people in Belgium actually speak Walloon? Some middle aged and older people in the countryside, and on top of that, only in some situations? Maybe they start using Walloon when they enter middle age? But still, people who move into cities will not speak Walloon, there is no occasion to use it.

I believe that in Switzerland, the local German dialects are strong though.

Walloon has 500,000 speakers among five major lects. The central lect or Central Walloon is understood by all, so it is more or less the koine or standard. Intelligibility among the lects is very controversial, but the eastern and southern lects or Eastern and Southern Walloon are hard to understand.

Walloon is doing pretty well. I have had at least a couple of commenters on here who were native speakers. They seemed to be men in their 30’s-40’s.

You have whole cities in some places where everyone speaks Walloon, especially over by the French border. Everyone in Tournai speaks Walloon, even teenagers. I know that from reports on the Net. Tournai actually speaks Picardian Walloon or Western Walloon. There’s Picardian Walloon, and then right across the border in France by Valenciennes there’s Walloonian Picard. One’s Picard, and one’s Walloon. Oh, and they can’t understand each other.

By the way, Picard is very heavily spoken in Valenciennes in France on the border. Of all of the langues d’oil, Picard is maybe in the best shape. The Picardian region is a hardscrabble rural area with a lot of miners and a very traditional way of life, and they don’t want to give up Picard. Furthermore, Picard has reasonably good intelligibility with Parisien at 65%. Picard has all sorts of dialects within it.

I think Charleroi is also heavy Walloon speaking. I know that Namur is Walloon-speaking also.

Really, the whole of French Flanders speaks either Walloon or Belgian French, and Belgian French is quite different from Parisien French. The differences are at least like British and American English and maybe even worse. I am sure that all Belgian French speakers can understand Parisien French. The question would be if the Parisien speakers can understand Belgian French, and there are some reports of difficult intelligibility in that direction.

From what I can see there are whole cities where everyone down to teenagers heavily speaks Walloon, so I figure it will be around til the end of the century. I found a French messageboard where everyone was writing in French. It was for regional languages. There were certainly a lot of angry people on there, but they were all French people or French speakers, they all spoke the various minority languages of France and the surrounding areas, and most importantly, most people on the board were teenagers and young adults in their 20’s! The Walloon section was very active, full of Walloon-speaking teenagers from all over the area, and many of them were writing in Walloon, so apparently there is a written standard.

Belgium has not been real evil about regional languages like France. I doubt if it has been real great either. It’s probably somewhere in the middle. These countries do not wish to recognize any minority lect that is related the official languages, which is another matter altogether.

For sure a lot to most middle aged people speak Walloon in a lot of places, and no doubt majorities of the old people speak it also in other places.

The lects are Western Walloon, Northern Walloon, Central Walloon, Eastern Walloon and Southern Walloon. Eastern for sure and Southern probably are separate languages. Central of course is the standard language, so that gives us two or probably three Walloons. Next comes the question of whether it is reasonable to split off Western and Northern Walloon, and I have no answer to that. I think all of the lects are in good shape.

In a small village in Belgium on the French border, Meuse, a dialect of Lorrain, a langue d’oil, was formerly spoken, but it may be extinct by now. Lorrain has many lects within it, and the language as a whole is in very bad shape. There are some middle aged and older speakers in places like Lille and Nancy. Some Lorrain lects which still have a few speakers have seen declines of up to 98% in the number of speakers. Lorrain is surely an endangered language. Some French speakers say they can understand maybe 1% of Lorrain.

The langues d’oil are really separate languages. The French state has even admitted that, but it still won’t give them any rights due to “progressive” Jacobinism which has said for 200 years that Parisien is the only language in France, and there can be no other official languages. For a supposedly progressive ideology, Jacobinism is awfully nationalistic and ugly. Laicite secularism seems to go a bit to far too if you ask me.

Anglo-Saxon Maverick: I would assume that low German, comes from the Northern regions of Germany close to the North Sea, where the elevation is lower?, as opposed to further South where the Alps rise? Holland is topographically lower than France, hence the name?

Yes, the Netherlands is very low in elevation, in fact, I believe it is even below sea level, hence the need for dikes to keep the sea out and polders or reclaimed land formerly flooded by the sea.

Yes, this exactly where Low German comes from of course.

And yes, Upper German comes from the region by the Alps, and Middle German is in between the two. These are actually at least three completely different languages, but Germany will not officially recognize them as such and neither will many German speakers. Even Bavarian and Swiss German are completely separate languages – those are not the same languages as German at all.

A German speaker cannot understand a Swiss German, Low German or even a Bavarian speaker at all. I heard a story about a White man who even learned Munich Bavarian who said he sat in a hot tub with two women who were speaking some Bavarian dialect to the south of Munich near the Austrian border. Over a 2-3 hour period, he said he did not understand one single word that they said, even though all three spoke Bavarian. Bavarian speakers to the south of Munich often cannot understand people even 15 miles away. In these cases, they all communicate via Hochdeutch or Standard German.

In Austria, every region or county speaks its own version of Bavarian and it is said that none of them can understand each other. At least in the 1970’s, people from 3-4 counties in the west of Austria could sit at a table and talk and none of them could really understand each other. Even pure Viennese Bavarian which is very much dying out nowadays simply cannot be understood outside of the Vienna region and nowadays a lot of Viennese themselves cannot even understand it.

According to TIME, dateline Geneva, there is more to it than what the recent comments above say:

“The biggest change to the firearms legislation was made in 2007, requiring soldiers to store their bullets in an arsenal rather than in the households, but they were allowed to continue to keep their firearms at home. However, people who own private guns can purchase ammunition freely, as long as their weapon is registered.”

So the implied argument that all Swiss have guns but no ammo is false, according to TIME. As you see here, many many many guns and mucho mucho mucho ammo, but very low gun crimes:

“Because of these traditions, gun ownership in Switzerland is among the highest in the world, trailing behind only the U.S. and Yemen. Between 2.3 million and 4.5 million are estimated to be in circulation in a country of only 8 million people. But while the gun-suicide rate is fairly high — about 300 cases a year — the number of violent crimes is relatively low: government figures show about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. By comparison, the U.S. rate in the same year was about five firearm killings per 100,000 people, according to a 2011 U.N. report.”

So yes, the “Switzerland Argument” has merit in support of private gun and ammo ownership.

“Shooting is also a popular pastime. The Swiss learn to shoot from an early age, master safety techniques and develop a sense of responsibility toward their firearms. It is not unusual to see entire families — kids as young as 12 and their grandparents — participating in target practice or sharpshooting competitions that are held in towns and villages across the country.”

Safety with firearms is learned from a young age.

The article references two mass shootings in Switzerland. One was very recent, April 2013. The overall rate of gun violence though is low, statistically low.

Nope, actually the Swiss example has absolutely no merit whatsoever in terms of private possession of guns.

So what’s your point? In Switzerland, there may or may not be a lot loaded weapons in homes – the article did not state how many Swiss actually bought ammo and then loaded it into their guns and kept loaded guns around the home. Perhaps most Swiss who have these guns do not purchase ammo on the private market, and anyway, the home gun loaded or not must be locked away at home. Also those guns must be locked away when they are in the home. It’s really going to do a lot of good defending your home against an invader with a locked away gun, huh?

I suppose they can take their guns out of their locked cases where they are stored at home in order to go to the shooting competition in town, but then they have to bring the guns back to the home and lock them up again. How many are going to leave the shooting competition and go on a shooting spree?

Even if it is true that somehow Switzerland has lots of loaded guns lying around in homes all over the land and somehow manages a low crime rate nevertheless, it is utterly irrelevant to the US. Because here, in spite of the possible Swiss experience, a locked and loaded society deluged with guns is in fact causing a tsunami of gun crimes. Yeah, if we were like Switzerland, that might not be so. But we are not like Switzerland. So what is the point of bringing up the irrelevant example in the first place?

The point about gun safety is also irrelevant. Whenever we discuss accidents, which by the way, kill 1,000 Americans every year or three every day, the gun nuts say, “Well those people are idiots who do not know any good gun safety. If they knew gun safety, this would never have happened.”

This argument is also irrelevant. How long have the gun nuts been yelling about gun safety and how people are supposed to learn it and then we will not have any more gun issues. 40 years? 50 years? So what has happened in the interim period? Have Americans learned any better gun safety than they had 40-50 years ago? Of course not. Will they learn it well before I die? Probably not. We seem doomed to have a nation of gun safety morons into the forseeable future.

Also this argument is horribly hypocritical in that many times we gun controllers have passed laws mandating gun safety courses before one can purchase a firearm. Guess how the NRA reacted to each and every attempt to do that? They oppose and continue to oppose all of our efforts to mandate passing a gun safety course before you buy a gun.

Those gun safety courses are not that great either. A gun safety instructor recently committed suicide with the gun he was demonstrating in front of his horror-striken class.

Gun nuts are just like all conservatives. Most of their arguments are just wrong.

Switzerland does show that isn’t NECESSARILY the case. I do not really want more guns in Britain though and you may be in general right. It would be good if you could show us a graph or a map comparing gun ownership and homicide rates.

The guns in Switzerland are stored at the armory, and I would bet that they are all longarms. I doubt if possession of handguns is as liberal as in the US, and I am almost certain that they do not allow semiautomatics. The Swiss government officially owns all of those guns that the Swiss supposedly own themselves.

The Switzerland argument is insipid. When we say we need gun control in the US, the gun nuts whip out the Switzerland example to show that gun control would not work in the US. The argument is senseless.

Yes, the Swiss example appears to show that you can have a society with high gun ownership that has little crime.

But so what?

If you go the way of liberalization, you are playing with fire. Nations tighten up their gun laws all the time. Every heard of one single country anywhere on Earth loosening up their gun laws to make them along US lines? Of course not. Obviously it’s a bad idea since nobody wants to do it, and every country thinks it is a crazy thing to do.

Yep, high gun ownership is not causing much crime in Switzerland.

But here is why that argument is nonsensical.

High gun ownership is causing a ton of gun crime and gun homicide in the US, unlike Switzerland. The US will probably never be like Switzerland. If we were like the Swiss, there would be no need to ban guns. Considering that an incredible amount of crime in the US is gun crime, and gun homicide rates here are very high, it stands to reason that making guns less available would cut into some of those homicide rates.

This is the first I have ever heard of the Arpitan language. This segment is the Evolénard dialect spoken in the Valais region of Switzerland. This language sounds completely strange to me. Every now and then, it sounds something like French, but mostly it’s just sui generis. I could not pick up one word of this.

Arpitan split from proto-langue d’oil around 800-900. This is really the intermediate langue between North Gallo-Romance and South Gallo-Romance.

What is Gallo-Romance? Gallo-Romance is that branch of Romance that is derived from the Vulgar Latin that arose from Gaullic speaking regions. The north went to the langues d’oil and French. Langues d’oil started to split around 900 or so. The south went to Rhaetian in the Alps -Romansch and Ladin and the Gallo-Romance languages of northern Italy. It is true – the Italian languages of northern Italy are closer to French than they are to Italian.

Arpitan is said to retain a strong resemblance to Latin itself – it is very archaic.

As a linguist who has actually worked in the field as a professional linguist (and anthropologist) I happen to know quite a bit about official language laws around the world.

Most countries of the world have at least one official language. In Latin America, it is generally Spanish. In Africa, it is often a colonial language along with one or more large national languages. India has about 13 official languages, often one for each state, with English and Hindi given some prominence. In Israel, believe it or not, Arabic and Hebrew are official languages.

The official languages of the Philippines are Tagalog and English. In Europe, the official language tends to be the main language of the country – German in Germany, Portuguese in Portugal, Dutch in Holland, etc. Sometimes, a smaller regional language is also designated an official (regional) language, but these are mostly just used in a certain area.

Some European countries have many official languages, without apparent problems. The Netherlands has 13 official languages, if you can believe that. Finland has 2, Swedish and Finnish. The UK has three – French (Channel Islands), Welsh and English. Switzerland has three – French, German, Italian and Romansch. Belgium has French, German and Dutch. Ireland has Irish and English.

Having more than one official language in most or all cases has not caused any problems with separatism. Where separatism exists, it was present or even worse while the regional language was being suppressed. Separatism will exist in some cases whether you repress it by force or if you allow autonomy to flower.

The French are pretty terrible about this – as French is the only official language in France and the French are bigots towards other languages. In Canada, French is an official language in Quebec, but they have been speaking French in Quebec before there was a Canada. French is an indigenous language there. The Turks and some Arab states are bigoted about Turkish and Arabic.

In general, though, official languages are not much of a source of problem in most of the world, only where they are used as instruments of the ultranationalist chauvinism described above. And why should not everyone in Turkey, France and some Arab states just speak Turkish, French and Arabic only?

Well, maybe they should, but they also have a right to speak their regional language, because the Bretons and Basques were speaking Breton and Basque long before there was a France. The Kurds have been speaking Kurdish in Turkey for thousands of years before there was a Turkish state. The Kurds and Assyrians in Iraq and Syria spoke their languages for thousands of years before there was an Iraq or Syria.

Many countries have quite a few official languages. As noted, India has 13. South Africa has 11 official languages. Adopting quite a few languages as official has not been much of a problem for most countries, though Americans probably think it is stupid or crazy.

Which brings us to the United States. Official language policy has sadly fallen to the same lunatic forces that have taken over our immigration debate. Do we have an official language in the US? No, we do not, but many states do. About 30 states have designated English as the official language, New Mexico has designated Spanish an official language and Hawaii has designated Hawaiian as an official language.

Is it rational for Hawaiian to be an official language of Hawaii? Sure, it’s been spoken there for hundreds of years before we stole the place. Spanish in New Mexico? Sure. When New Mexico was admitted to the Union, a large percentage of the population were Spanish speakers of Spanish, not Mexican, heritage.

There are many Indian languages in the US, but most of them are dying, and many are already dead. They have few speakers and in no case do they make up a large percentage of a state’s speakers.

Nor do we have a situation similar to New Mexico anywhere else in the US. When California was admitted to the US, there were some Spanish-speaking Californios (only .1% of the population of Mexico lived in California when it was a part of Mexico), but they were quite outnumbered by then by English-speakers flooding in with the Gold Rush.

The vast majority of Spanish speakers in California are relatively recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, legal and illegal, with some second language speakers like me. I am not aware of any case anywhere on Earth where the language of a recent wave of immigrants has been granted official status. If you know of one, let me know.

The vast majority of the people in the US speak English. According to global norms, English should be the official language of the United States. In most of the sane world, that would be a noncontroversial view, and speaking as a linguist, it would be linguistically justified. Yet for some reason, people who advocate English as the official language of the US are derided as bigots!

This is completely bizarre. In the vast majority of the world, making the language of the vast majority of citizens the, or an, official language is a boring and mundane decision. Rarely is the specter of racism raised.

If we can make English an official language of the US without appealing to the language bigots or nativists, let’s do it. English as an, or the, official language need not be the same as English-only. I don’t see why governments at all levels and any businesses could not continue to provide notices and services in other languages for recent immigrants if English was an official language – it’s a rational and humanitarian thing to do.